Is being a virtuoso pointless?
Being a virtuoso guitar player is pointless, I agree. When I was 17 I was well on the way to becoming a virtuoso. When I began to understand music properly and how it worked, I abandoned that idea pretty quickly. Even if you don’t like them, Noel Gallagher, Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke aren’t virtuoso guitar players but have written the best songs of the last 20 years. For me, the best comparison is George Harrison and Eric Clapton. There’s a difference. Harrison and Clapton played a similar solo style, the difference being that Harrison’s guitar was way more melodic, emotional and fitted its song so well. Clapton’s playing was self indulgent twaddle with a dull song written around it. Virtuosity in music is only really of any use in the classical style of music. And a virtuoso guitar player is about the most tacky type of musician you can get. Trust me, I’ve been in bands with some. I’d rather listen to a messed up Cobain, Pixies, Radiohead style solo where it’s actually about a musicia
Being a virtuoso isn’t pointless, as long as you can still be basic, expressive, and are creative. Virtuosity is often mistaken for being able to play lots of notes really really fast. I consider that merely being a master of technique. I believe true virtuosos don’t let flash get in the way of expression. I think you can be great without being a virtuoso, but I also think you can be a virtuoso and be great. The guitarists you mentioned may be masters of technique, but if their music seems empty–in my book, they are not virtuosos.
Yes, I’ve noticed this. The truth is that its actually much harder to write a simple, accessible, catchy, memorable melody that’s fresh and new, than it is to play something fast and flashy and complex that no one will remember 5 minutes after you get done playing it. A lot of what the so-called virtuoso guitarists like Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen do sounds complex and difficult because its played really really fast — but I think a lot of it is just a lot of variations of scale patterns and arpeggio patterns and pre-memorized licks. If improvisation is “spontaneous composition in the moment”, there’s very little or none of that going on in most of their solos. They play too fast for them to have time to be truly spontaneous and think of new musical ideas off the cuff, so to speak. At those tempos all they can do is string together prelearned patterns and licks. IMO, most of what they play is (to quote Shakespeare) a lot of “sound and fury signifying nothing.
